Harvard Survey Finds Men Significantly More Likely to Claim They Recognize Fictional AI Executives
Published · curated by AI Is Going Just Great
Source: wired.com ↗
"There's so much confidence in either doom or abundance. It just drowns out all of the voices that should be saying 'not sure.'"
A Harvard Kennedy School survey of 5,400 Americans found that 53 percent of male respondents said they recognized "Susan Milner" and "Craig Dalton" — two AI executives invented by researchers as a test. (Forty percent of women made the same claim.) The real person in that group, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, was recognized by roughly the same share of men who recognized the fake ones.
The pattern held beyond made-up names. Men and women answered factual AI questions incorrectly at roughly the same rate, but women said "not sure" an average of 3.3 times out of 12 questions versus 2.3 for men. Researchers also found that men were named in AI-related headlines more than 14 times as often as women over a year of media coverage, and that three-quarters of AI "subject experts" quoted in that coverage were male — a higher proportion than the actual AI talent pool, which is about 29 percent women.